Police Vow to Pursue Pedophile Ring ‘To the Ends of the Earth’

Authorities in Australia say they intend to apprehend and prosecute every member of an international child pornography ring that exploited a boy who was molested from infancy by two men who reportedly created him with a Russian surrogate mother. “With this network, rest assured that we will pursue them to the ends of the Earth to make sure each and every one of them faces justice for what their role has been in crimes against this child,” Queensland Police Officer Jon Rousetold the Australian Broadcasting Company.

Officer Rouse is a member of Task Force Argos, the special unit that investigated the case of two Australian men who sexually molested a boy for six years, providing video of their crimes — and even paid sexual encounters with the boy — to an “international syndicate” of pedophiles called the Boy Lovers Network.

Mark Newton, 42, was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison last week by U.S. District Court Judge Sarah Evans Barker. Authorities say Newton and his partner, Peter Truong, 36, paid a Russian woman $8,000 to give birth to a boy they said was conceived using artificial insemination with Newton’s sperm. The men began sexually abusing the boy before he was two weeks old, recording the acts on video they shared online with other pedophiles.

Peter Truong (left) and Mark Newton (right) with their victim in 2010.

“What can be said? What can be done to erase some of the horror of this?” Judge Barker said Friday in giving the maximum sentence to Newton, an American who had become an Australian citizen. Prosecutors said the case was tried in Judge Barker’s U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana because images of the boy were found on the computer of an Indiana man who was arrested as part of a larger child-pornography investigation.

Records in the case had previously been sealed, the Indianapolis Star reported. Newton and Truong made the boy available for molestation by other men in France, Germany and the United States, according to prosecutors. “For more than one year and across three continents, these men submitted this young child to some of the most heinous acts of exploitation that this office has ever seen,” said U.S. Attorney Joe Hogsett.

Two U.S. men, John R. Powell, 41, of Florida; and Jason Bettuo, 36, of Illinois, also face federal charges in connection with the case. Police say they believe Newton and Truong created the boy “for the sole purpose of exploitation,” according to the Sydney Morning Herald, which reported:

Judge Barker said the pair brainwashed the child to believe the sexual abuse was normal. Newton was also said to have trained the boy to deny any inappropriate behaviour if he was ever questioned by authorities. Newton and Truong came to the attention of police in August 2011 after their connections to three men arrested over the possession of child exploitation material came to light. The couple had visited the three men in the US, New Zealand and Germany with their son. While the couple were visiting family in the US, Queensland police searched their Cairns home and found enough evidence to alert their US counterparts who raided their Los Angeles base and took the boy into custody. Newton and Truong claimed they were being targeted because they were homosexual. However after his arrest in February 2011, Truong gave investigators the password to the computer hard drives police had seized. It detailed the years of abuse.

Newton and Truong, identified only by their first names, were featured in a July 2010 Australian Broadcasting Company report entitled, “Why two dads are better than one.” The article, which sympathetically chronicled the difficulties the gay couple had with the adoption and immigration process, was deleted from the network’s Web site after Newton and Truong’s crimes were revealed. The reporter on that 2010 article, Ginger Gorham, said Monday she never suspected the two men were pedophiles. “I felt no sense anything was wrong,” Gorham told the Australian network. “For all intents and purposes this appeared to be a loving family and a loving household, and I’ve gone over and over about it in my brain and I did not feel anything was wrong.”

Australian reporter Ginger Gorman says she did not suspect men were molesting the boy.

“I’m profoundly shocked and disgusted by what’s happened,” Gorman told reporter Caro Meldrum-Hanna for the network’s “7:30″ program. “Since then, I just am revolted and I find myself quite despairing about the turn of events.”

Prosecutors said videos showed the boy “performing sex acts on Newton with a disturbing level of sophistication” when the boy was not yet 2 years old. At least eight different men had sex with the boy, investigators believe. “The purchase of the child for the explicit and sole purpose of exploiting him across a network of men is incredibly depraved and very sad tale for that little boy,” Officer Rouse said.

Newton, an American who had emigrated to Australia, and Truong were described by authorities as part of a worldwide network of “men who believe that the sexual abuse and rape of boys … is a form of consensual love.” As many as 70,000 men once belonged to a site, BoyLover.net, that was shut down in a series of 2009 arrests involving more than 600 suspected pedophiles and more than 200 child victims.

Sadly I believe that these events, less the child being born specifically for this, happens much more often then we want to ever admit. I hope that this little boy can eventually grow up to have a normal and happy life.

Wait...the pair protested that they were "targeted for being gay", but they are on film molesting a little boy. Right now my head is about to explode with the cognitive dissonance the gay-affiming media has implanted there. For everyone-upon-everyone knows that it's straight males who are the ones molesting all the little boys, hint-hint, wink-wink. It's the straight guys. The gay males would never deign to this kind of thing, they are too sophisticated, too ethical, too domestically-stable in their relationships to ever resort to something such as this. So for them to protest that they're being targeted because they're "homosexual", I say, they are lying about being homosexual, for each and every one of us knows, a homosexual could never molest a child. Please.